Powerless, by Lauren Roberts

Paedyn Gray is a homeless orphan, surviving the slums of Ilya by thieving and hiding her great secret – a lack of an elite ability that is essential to be allowed to live in this country. Ordinaries have been declared diseased and are banished or killed, so Paedyn’s late father trained her powers of observation to pose as a psychic. When she saves the life of the King’s enforcer, Prince Kai, Paedyn is forced to compete in the five-yearly Elite trials, pitting her ‘psychic’ skills against those with super strength, super speed, and powers of illusion, kinesis and transformation. The secret sauce to great SF and fantasy is building a believable world, which then allows the reader to suspend disbelief about events that happen within it. The low quality ketchup underlying Powerless, combined with pedestrian writing, makes this poor man’s Hunger Games an increasingly tedious read. It’s full of explicit and gratuitous violence, with a ludicrously chaste love triangle. Powerless indeed.

Three Juliets, by Minnie Darke

In 1964, aged 16, Claudie Miller was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Sixteen years later the successful designer of children’s clothes receives a diagnosis and begins the search for her lost child. She narrows it down to three candidates – Roisin, Bindi and Miranda – but can Claudie identify her daughter before it’s too late? The tale is told from the perspective of Claudie, in Sydney, in the 1960s and 80s and from that of the three young women - in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney - in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. It clearly traces the changing attitudes to adoption and single motherhood over the decades, depicting the horrors of forced adoption and how legal reforms eventually enabled birth families to trace each other. Mothers, both natural and adoptive, get a fairly bad rap in this story – they are depicted as selfish, possessive, controlling or neglectful more than loving, although sometimes that too. It’s complicated and to some extent, realistic. The fashion is fun and an essentially sad story gets an ending that is as happy as is possible.

I Want Everything, by Dominic Amerena

Brenda Shales wrote two controversial and influential books in the 70s, before disappearing after a ruinous court case resulting from her second book. When she is recognised by a young ambitious writer and tracked to a run-down retirement village in Melbourne’s west, a misunderstanding leads to her spilling her story to him. He perpetuates the misunderstanding in an attempt to make his career, but can he maintain the deception and does it amount to literary fraud? This is a clever tale that twists in on itself and raises the question of who’s zooming who? The name of the young writer is never revealed – a slightly clunky device that has a point, made at the end of the story. This is a cruel take on the Australian literary scene and no-one comes out of it well.

Landfall, by James Bradley

A five-year-old girl is missing and a category five cyclone – the third in four years – is due to hit Sydney in the next week. Police detective Sadiya Azad must battle racism, misogyny and corruption as well as the literal rising tide of climate change to find the child and solve a murder that seems to be linked to her disappearance. Set 20 to 30 years in the future, following the ‘great melt’, Bradley paints an all-too-believable dystopian picture of where the current reality of fanning xenophobia, lip service on climate action and rising inequality is likely to take us. The tense crime thriller thinly cloaks a plea for more empathetic treatment of refugees and urgent action on climate change. It ends rather abruptly, with several questions left unanswered, but on a note of hope – based on human connection.

The Magic Faraway Tree (2025), directed by Ben Gregor

The beloved Enid Blyton tale has been tastefully updated for this film that features a stellar cast and appealing children. Polly quits her job as an industrial designer on ethical grounds and she and house husband Tim uproot their three city kids and move to the country to pursue an old dream. No surprises that the kids are not impressed, especially moody teen Beth. But the youngest, Frannie, discovers magic in the woods, literally finds her voice and leads her siblings to accept and even embrace their new life in the natural world. The best children’s films operate on several levels to provide entertainment for all ages. This is not that film, with messages that are worthy and a little heavy-handed. Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield are lovely as the parents , the kids are great and the supporting cast includes Nicola Coughlan, Jennifer Saunders and a string of well-known actors, such as Rebecca Ferguson, Lenny Henry and Judi Dench, in tiny roles. There are a few laughs, the cinematography is beautiful and the magical lands at the top of the tree are brought to life well for the most part in a sweet, but ultimately forgettable film.

Legacy, by Chris Hammer

A bomb destroys the launch of crime journalist Martin Scarsden’s latest book, an expose of the Melbourne mafia. This sends his wife and son overseas for their safety, while he heads out west, off grid and incognito. But it turns out he is now too well known to go unrecognised, especially when he is drawn into a longstanding feud across the Queensland/New South Wales border involving, as ever, water. Meanwhile disgraced ghostwriter Ecco has been hired to write the history of one of the feuding families, discovering more than she expected about a historic mystery of missing explorers and a more recent disappearance of an apparently murderous family member. As usual with a Hammer tale there is a lot going on and it can get a bit confusing at the start, switching between three points of view. This is not helped by one strand - excerpts of the missing woman’s diaries – printed in great slabs of italics that are physically difficult to read. Note to publishers – just use a different font, not bloody italics! The three twisty strands are gradually brought together into a nice plait, although a few convenient coincidences are needed to get there and the timeline is a little fuzzy. Slight spoiler – there are no red herrings in this story; every suspect is guilty of something!

Last One Out, by Jane Harper

Ro Crowley makes her fifth annual pilgrimage from Sydney to Carralon Ridge for the anniversary of her son Sam’s birth and also of his disappearance on his 21st birthday. The town is dying of slow strangulation by an expanding coal mine and what remains of the community is still bitterly divided on those who ‘sold out’ and those who stayed to fight. The novel strongly evokes the grief of losing a child and the devastation of not knowing what has happened when someone goes missing. But the plot is unlikely and unconvincing and it takes too long, lingering over the town’s decay before rushing to the result and a somewhat fairytale ending.